Our Philosophy

Open signals reveal hidden truths

The founding thesis behind Alt Signal Intelligence draws on a tradition as old as economics itself: when official data is absent, unreliable, or deliberately obscured, the physical world still speaks.

The Secret Fuel, 1954

In 1954, economist Armen Alchian was working at the RAND Corporation. The United States was secretly building the hydrogen bomb. The specific fuel that made it work was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the country.

Alchian did not have security clearance for the bomb programme. But he had something better: the stock market.

He started with a list of candidate materials (thorium, beryllium, lithium) and the companies that produced them. Then he simply tracked their share prices. After Operation Castle, a series of nuclear tests in March 1954, one stock separated from the pack. Lithium Corporation of America surged 461% in a single year. Every other candidate material was flat.

From public data alone, Alchian correctly identified lithium as the secret fuel. He wrote a paper. RAND suppressed it. The United States government requested he destroy it. He had derived a classified secret from publicly available data.

This was fifteen years before the "event study" became a recognised financial research method. Alchian was not a spy. He was an economist who understood a simple truth:

The information was public. No one was looking.

Poor Numbers, 2013

In 2013, economist Morten Jerven published Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do About It. The book documented how GDP statistics across Sub-Saharan Africa were based on outdated household surveys, incomplete administrative records, and sometimes pure guesswork.

The examples were striking. Ghana revised its GDP upward by 60% overnight in 2010, simply by updating the base year for its national accounts from 1993 to 2006. Entire sectors of the economy had been invisible to official statistics for nearly two decades. Nigeria did the same in 2014, and its GDP nearly doubled on paper.

Jerven's argument was not that African governments were lying. It was worse: the statistical infrastructure to produce reliable numbers simply did not exist in many countries. International organisations like the World Bank and IMF then used these unreliable figures to make policy recommendations, allocate aid, and rank countries by development.

The response from researchers was not to give up. It was to turn to proxy signals. Satellite imagery of nighttime lights became a widely used estimator of economic activity. Mobile phone usage data tracked consumer behaviour. Shipping records measured trade flows. These physical-world signals could not be fabricated by statistical offices, and they updated continuously.

The same problem exists everywhere. The scale varies. The method does not.

The Same Principle, Today

The problems Alchian exploited and Jerven documented are not limited to nuclear secrets or developing economies. They exist in every country, at every level.

US GDP arrives quarterly, 30 days late, and gets revised three times. Non-farm payrolls are revised for months after release. The Consumer Price Index uses rental equivalence models that lag actual market rents by over a year. China's PMI carries a well-known credibility discount. Consumer confidence surveys measure what people say they feel, not what they actually do.

Meanwhile, the physical world generates a constant stream of economic signals that no government controls:

Satellites photograph ports, factories, and car parks whether anyone wants them to or not. Electricity demand is metered in real time. Ships broadcast their positions by law. Subway turnstiles count every passenger. Job postings appear weeks before hiring shows up in payroll data. Commodity futures price in supply disruptions before any survey confirms them.

These signals are faster (available days or weeks before official releases), unrevised (a satellite image does not get "seasonally adjusted" three months later), independent (they do not come from the same surveys and models that produce official data), and open (most are freely available through government APIs, satellite programmes, and public datasets).

The gap between what open data reveals and what official data reports is not a curiosity. It is an edge.

What we build on

Physical signals over surveys
Electricity consumption, shipping traffic, and transit ridership cannot be fabricated. They measure what is actually happening, not what respondents claim.
Open data, proprietary analysis
We use publicly available data sources. Our edge is not access. It is the algorithms, geographic matching, confidence scoring, and composite construction that turn noise into signal.
Statistical rigour over storytelling
Every signal passes walk-forward backtesting across multiple holdout windows. We publish out-of-sample statistics, not cherry-picked charts. If a signal does not survive validation, we kill it.
Global by default
Economic intelligence should not be limited to the US. We track signals across 12 countries, with city-level depth in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Alchian proved in 1954 that public data can reveal what official sources will not tell you. Jerven showed in 2013 that official sources themselves are often unreliable. We are building the infrastructure to do what both of them described, systematically and at scale, for the global economy.

See the data for yourself

265+ signals across 12 countries. Free to explore. No account required.

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